Pipedrive is a solid CRM for helping small & midsized companies manage distributor deals. Here is everything you need to know to make the most out of Pipedrive for distributor sales.
How you manage your distributor deals will either help or hurt your forecast accuracy, and can make or break your sales growth. Enter Pipedrive: a solid CRM that can help you stay on top of distributor deals and not lose track of anything important. Here are some tips to get started with Pipedrive for distributor sales – and how SP_CE can help.
Pipedrive for distributor sales: 5 tips for success
1. Set up your Pipedrive pipeline for distributors – and customize your stages
Creating a dedicated pipeline specifically for distributor relationships will help a lot and give you an easy overview of deals in progress. Here, you can also create stages that mirror your distributor/customer journey, for example:
- Initial Contact
- Qualification
- Proposal
- Negotiation
- Contract
- Onboarding
- Active Partnership
- Review/Renewal
By custom-making your stages in this way, you can make sure to track distributors across the milestones that actually matter.
2. Use custom fields to track distributor-specific data
By using custom fields that capture the information that matter, you can be sure to stay on top of distributor progress. This may mean that you create fields for geographic territory, product lines and minimum order quantities.
3. Create labels and filters to organize your distributors
You can, for example, create labels for things like:
- Size (A, B, C or 1,2,3 tiers)
- Geographic region
- Product specialization
- Performance level
This can make it easier to filter distributors and getting a solid overview.
4. Track distributor performance by adding dashboards
To visualize data and track performance, you can create custom dashboards with insights such as sales volume, growth rate comparison, product mix analysis and territory coverage. This can make it so much easier to quickly assess what matters to you, make data-driven decisions and take action fast.
5. Add a Partner Portal connected to Pipedrive
While the above can help you structure your Pipedrive for distributor sales – and gain a solid oversight of partner performance – the challenge is oftentimes to get information from partners. Especially as they are probably not invited into your Pipedrive, and where companies have traditionally asked partners for the information and then added/updated deals manually in Pipedrive. Which tends to take a lot of time and threatens to make your sales forecast a guesstimation.
This is one of the things that SP_CE can help you with. Our Partner Portal lets you integrate Pipedrive and allow distributors to enter and update deals directly in their private portal – sending all updates to your Pipedrive. Seamlessly, automatically and easily.
SP_CE & Pipedrive for distributor sales
Pipedrive is an excellent CRM system for many distributor sales organizations – and SP_CE can let you upgrade the experience for both your own team members and partners. Making it easier to do business with you and driving more sales in the process. Curious to learn more? Contact us today to see SP_CE in action or learn more about SP_CE for Pipedrive
